Denyse O'Leary

From the Templeton Foundation we learn that the big crackdown paper, taking dead aim at aimed at science teachers who have enough sense to doubt Darwinism has morphed into a Templeton-funded book. Think anti-evolution teaching is confined to schools in certain regions? Think again. Plutzer says he and Berkman find that “active proponents of creationism as science can be found in every state, even in fairly cosmopolitan school districts.” While it is true that those who reject evolution tend to find jobs in more socially conservative school districts, where they receive parental backing, it’s also the case that teachers who experience the most pressure teach in districts with large and clashing constituencies of conservative Protestants and pro-evolution opponents. Says Plutzer, Read More ›

Cautiously introduced as a “guest voice” in the Washington Post, commentator David Klinghoffer talks about Alfred Russel Wallace, co-theorist of natural selection, as a voice for healing the current social divide between the elite sinless Monkeyman and the traditional popular Adam: Pro-Darwinian educators were frustrated this week to find that most public high school biology instructors in their teaching do not wholeheartedly endorse evolution. The teachers reflect a stubborn division across American culture. For the past three decades, Americans have been locked into a basically unchanging split of views on the subject, with only about 16 percent believing in Darwin’s theory of unguided evolution. Darwinism is, at bottom, a theory about us (trousered apes, meat puppets, etc.). Now, obviously, when Read More ›

This is one of those stories about which one says, I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t believed it.

These three Ohio bucks somehow locked antlers while battling near a small creek. When one deer slid into a shallow pool, it sealed the fate for all three, who drowned together, antlers still locked. Steve Hill talked to the men who found and recovered the deer and their combined 400-inches of antler to bring you the story of this sad, almost poetic scene.

Some said, heartlessly, that they’d make a nice chandelier. Others asked sensible questions:

Wildlife biologists are taught that anthropomorphism—endowing the animals they study with human qualities—is not good science. Yet, says Mike Tonkovich, deer project leader for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, “I can’t help wondering what was that third buck thinking? Whatever possessed him to get engaged when the two were already entangled?”

Mmmm … Stupidity? He wasn’t thinking anything? Question: How many times has this happened when no human was around to see it?

But others outgassed on Darwinism: Read More ›

I would not have known, if I hadn’t read Suzan Mazur’s The Altenberg 16 (on the growing collapse of Darwinism): While speaking at Manhattan’s Ethical Culture Society meeting one Saturday night (March 12, 2008) on his book, The God Delusion, as she tells it, Richard Dawkins

admitted to being “guilty” of viewing Darwinism as a kind of religion and vowed to “reform”

Having a natural interest in reform, I would be most interested to learn of any evidence for this one. But now this, from Mazur:

(no one was allowed to tape Dawkins’ confession, however, with organizers of the event threatening to march offenders around the corner to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints). (p 97)

Can’t help wondering whether the warning was principally aimed at Mazur. Certainly, in her book, she manages to put a number of Darwin devotees and their enablers, whom the New York Times considers important authorities for no particularly good reason, in a much less flattering light than they are used to.

It seems that Mazur had met up with Dawkins the night before at a book signing. On self-organization theory (to which Mazur is partial), he noted, Read More ›

Here. He was briefly a born-again Christian as a youth, but

… my sister’s husband (an aspiring psychologist whose preference for graduate school over employment my father wasn’t wild about) suggested I read Beyond Freedom and Dignity by B.F. Skinner. As intellectuals go, Skinner was pretty dismissive of intellectuals — at least the ones who blathered unproductively about “freedom” and “dignity,” the ones he considered insufficiently hard-nosed and scientific.Look, he said, people are animals. Kind of like laboratory rats, except taller. Their behavioral proclivities are a product of the positive and negative reinforcements they’ve gotten in the past. Want to build a better society? Discern the links between past reinforcement and future proclivity, and then adjust society’s disbursement of reinforcements accordingly. No need to speculate about unobservable states of mind or ponder the role of “free will” or any other imponderables. Epistemology, phenomenology, metaphysics, and 25 cents will get you a ride on the New York subway.

This was my kind of intellectual — an anti-intellectual intellectual! I became an ardent Skinnerian.

However, that wore off, so then this: Read More ›

From the Templeton Foundation we learn that the big crackdown paper, morphed into a Templeton-funded book taking dead aim at aimed at science teachers who have enough sense to doubt Darwinism. Think anti-evolution teaching is confined to schools in certain regions? Think again. Plutzer says he and Berkman find that “active proponents of creationism as science can be found in every state, even in fairly cosmopolitan school districts.” While it is true that those who reject evolution tend to find jobs in more socially conservative school districts, where they receive parental backing, it’s also the case that teachers who experience the most pressure teach in districts with large and clashing constituencies of conservative Protestants and pro-evolution opponents. Says Plutzer, “In Read More ›

Michael Flannery, author of Alfred Russel Wallace’s Theory of Intelligent Evolution and Alfred Russel Wallace: A Rediscovered Life , sent this note re the latter book: John Landon has just posted a review of my Alfred Russel Wallace: A Rediscovered Life chiding me for not following the Roy Davies Darwin Conspiracy thesis that Charles “stole” Al’s theory of natural selection.I have explained my skepticism over this persistent plagiarism charge thoroughly in the book, not the least of which is that to make the accusation stick you really have to see both theories as one in the same, and I believe (as do most scholars) that closer examination reveals they are not. In fact, Wallace’s version appears on the face of Read More ›

Jean Staune, the non-Darwinian mathematician who is convinced that anglophones make a mess of everything (and suddenly burst into my life a while back with a rude letter to the effect that I was responsible*), nw offers this in a key French magazine: “L’hypothèse d’un créateur est scientifique” (The hypothesis of a creator is scientific.) I wonder what would happen if he went to the United States and said that. They’d assume he was a tent-shaking fundamentalist, I guess. This guy weighs in too. And a bunch of other folk. More on Staune here and here. The French are famous for quite rightly scoffing at “le Darwinisme.” But it’s rare that they’ve penetrated organized public stunnedness so as to be Read More ›

David Warren comes to some interesting conclusions on the decay of current legacy media, conclusions that you can mull over for yourself. But these are the observations I chiefly wish to note: Nothing is new under the sun, not even decay, but the slide of mainstream journalism — not merely into partisanship, but into the assertion of falsehoods and the hiding of truth — has become a public issue. Polls show declining public trust: Journalists often rank below politicians. More to the point, I have myself noticed the collapse of standards from within the trade, over several decades.One way to put this would be: “There are no broadsheets any more, only tabloids.” News media have become indistinguishable from the media Read More ›

Apparently you have, … if you are not designed. Over at MSNBC.com, Alan Boyle asked yesterday, What would happen if we found out that we are not alone in the universe? Or, on the flip side, what would happen if we decided that we really were alone? Experts provided updated answers to those age-old questions, from a scientific as well as a religious angle, during a Sunday session at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting. But one of the most intriguing questions had more of a personal spin: What would you ask E.T. if you had the chance? Well, what would you ask, readers? And, as for what would happen if we decided that we really Read More ›

I am currently reading New Zealand journalist Suzan Mazur’s excellent Altenberg 16, which, among other things, gives you a good look at the underbelly of the Darwin racket. For example, at the Rockefeller University Evolution Symposium (May 2009), Mazur, who has interviewed a number of prominent scientists who think that self-organization is one form of evolution, asked Eugenie Scott of NCSE (the Darwin lobby) why self-organization was not represented in the books that NCSE was promoting. She responded that people confuse self-organization with intelligent design and that is why NCSE has not been supportive. (P. 101) But later, NCSE responded “NCSE does not recommend specific textbook publishers to ensure that their treatment evolution is extensive, pervasive, and up-to-date, and we oppose Read More ›

Here, Matt Kaplan explains (Nature News, 20 February 2011), Twenty years ago the palaeontological community gasped as geoscientists revealed evidence for the oldest bacterial fossils on the planet. Now, a report in Nature Geoscience1 shows that the filament structures that were so important in the fossil descriptions are not remnants of ancient life, but instead composed of inorganic material. The finding … is not stirring feelings of jubilation. “After nearly 30 years of effort at pushing evidence for life to or beyond 3.5 billion years ago, we are reminded that the ancient record is more fraught with complications than we ever thought,” says geologist Stephen Mojzsis at the University of Colorado, Boulder. But hope springs eternal: Although the filamentous structures Read More ›

A friend put me onto a “neat” summation of the “Hox paradox” in Bioscience last year: “Taken together, these findings presented researchers with a paradox. On one hand, the basic machinery underlying early development, such as the Hox genes, is widely conserved among divergent phyla. But at the same time, these genes also underlie the development of distinct morphologies between more closely related species. The resolution of this “Hox paradox” is that the general role of many genes in patterning the embryo has been preserved, but the precise pattern of their expression or their influence on later events of development have both changed. These modifications are possible only through changes in regulatory interactions, whether mediated through changes in protein or Read More ›

From ScienceDaily (Feb. 18, 2011) this news, “Promise of Genomics Research Needs a Realistic View, Experts Urge”

Unrealistic expectations about genomic medicine have created a “bubble” that needs deflating before it puts the field’s long term benefits at risk, four policy experts write in the current issue of the journal Science.

Ten years after the deciphering of the human genetic code was accompanied by over-hyped promises of medical breakthroughs, it may be time to reevaluate funding priorities to better understand how to change behaviors and reap the health benefits that would result.

You mean, the dead shall not rise again in this life?

And,practically speaking,

After all, while advances are being made in personalized medicine through the tools of pharmacogenetics, “the most powerful predictor of drug efficacy is whether a patient takes the drug.”

In my own country, tens of thousands end up in the emerg every year due to beggaring around with powerful prescribed meds.

Reality check: If it’s powerful enough to help you, when taken right, it’s …

In many diseases a large number of genes play a role, making meaningful predictions difficult both for individuals and in public health.

To say nothing of all the other factors, like environment and age of first onset. Now this zinger: Read More ›

… this is the result:

The Neuromarketing lesson from this research is that if you want to be perceived as more flexible in dealing with a prospect while at the same time increasing their flexibility in reaching a deal, take these steps:Seat them in a soft chair.

If you hand them anything, avoid hard objects.

As I described in Heat Up Sales – With Coffee! (not coincidentally, based on research by John Bargh), offer them a warm beverage.

The combined effect will let you relate better emotionally to your prospect, and increase the chance of reaching a deal.

On a side note, this topic relates to the broader concept of neuroarchitecture. Will architects and designers begin to formally include findings from neuroscience and behavior research in their projects.

Okay, so now you know, suckers.

Rules for prospects: Read More ›